Author

L.A. Kauffman

L.A. Kauffman has been a grassroots strategist and movement journalist for more than 30 years. Her history of direct-action protest in the United States will be published by Verso Books in 2016. Follow L.A. Kauffman on Twitter.

Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective. L.A. Kauffman traces its troubled history and calls for its demise.

The Berkeley Journal of Sociology is run by a collective of graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. It seeks to contribute to the “history of the present” by publishing critical sociological perspectives on current social, economic, political, and environmental issues.